Volume 1 Issue 3

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Why do you tolerate stones rolling from the hills every night to crush your primrose and hosta? Instead of wielding a wheelbarrow

to tote them to the pond to drown, you coddle and polish them like pets. The long days easily shatter. A misplaced word, a name dropped,

a bad smell. The cats understand more clearly than priest or lawyers do. They twitch around the garden with their little hungers panting and claws ironically sheathed. Despite the showers of mayflies and the huffy, arrogant sunlight, I forge ahead with my paintings-- acrylics in maudlin colors the Museum of Modern Art refuses to recognize. You ask me to decorate your favorite stones with ghastly comic faces children would giggle into submission. But when I do, they open mouthfuls of prismatic crystal and speak. In plain English, they describe eons of geologic subjugation and centuries of glacial chaos. They complain that the invention of organic matter compromised the mission of Planet Earth. They insist that crushing flowers is part of their cosmic remit and that future gestures of bedrock will spark conversations we can’t afford to ignore. You’re delighted that the stones talk, but I’m tempted to paint out their faces and chip the crystals from their vugs, silencing them forever. The cats listen from a distance. If they also learn to talk, we and the stones would lose every argument and have to hunker into freshly turned soil in rhetorical shame.

William Doreski’s work has appeared in various print and e-journals and in several collections, most recently The Suburbs of Atlantis (AA Press, 2013).

From the Press

Our first book offers a ride of humorous memories from the 60s and 70s alongside detailed gray-scale drawings.Learn more

Wordpool Press is a publisher of fiction and nonfiction books in both print and electronic form. We also publish short stories, poetry, and artwork in our online literary journal titled Digital Papercut. Wordpool Press aims to help talented new writers build their publishing history.